From this dilemma the only escape seems to be frankly to admit that a billion years hence it will be "all the same," but to deny that, because it will be all the same then, it is a matter of indifference now. This argument, then, maintains that it will be all the same ultimately, and that it is an illusion to imagine that when man is extinct it can possibly matter. Here and now, however, and indeed as long as mankind continues to exist, right-doing is of the highest conceivable importance to man, more important even than happiness. But it is only as long as mankind continues to exist that it can continue to be important: its importance only exists in man's mind, and perishes with it. To say, therefore, that the ultimate defeat of the ethical process will, when established, be regrettable, is only to say that if we, or any other moral judge, were there to see it, we should feel regret about it; but we cannot possibly maintain that, because a moral judge would regret it, if he were there, therefore there will be one there to regret it. Of course, it is possible that the Unknowable may be a moral intelligence of this kind, because everything is possible with regard to the Unknowable. But we can neither affirm nor deny that or anything else about the Unknowable, for then the Unknowable would cease so far to be unknowable. The contention of this argument, then, is that for us men, and (as far as we have any positive knowledge) for us men alone, the laws of morality are real, intensely real; but their reality begins with man and ends with man. To this contention the reply is that as regards their reality the laws of morality are on exactly the same footing as the laws of science. Take the theory of evolution for instance: from scientific observations of what is going on now it infers what has been and what will be, it reconstructs the past and forecasts the future; it frames pictures of the globe as it was before man was evolved; it forms conceptions of the earth as it will be long after man is extinct. These conceptions and pictures, however, exist only in the mind of man, for the future does not yet exist and the past has ceased to be. That is to say, evolution is an inference, or rather a mass of inferences, which like all inferences exist in the mind, could not have existed before the mind, and cannot exist when the mind has ceased to be. Science, being the work of the mind (for we cannot say that it requires no intelligence), is just man's notion of what has been, is, and will be, in the same way that morality is man's conception of what ought to be. If we say that what ought to be will cease and become meaningless when man is extinct, then we must say the same of what has been, is, and will be. If the good, the noble, the right, are merely human ideas of what ought to be, matter and motion are merely human conceptions of what is. If the reality of the former is only to be found in the human mind, so is the reality of the latter.